In Search of Lost Time, Volume I_ Swann's Way - Marcel Proust [121]
“I shall come on Good Friday—to say good-bye to you, for we’re off to spend the holidays in Auvergne.”
“In Auvergne? To be eaten alive by fleas and vermin! A fine lot of good that will do you!” And after a solemn pause: “If you’d only told us, we would have tried to get up a party, and all gone there together in comfort.”
And so, too, if one of the “faithful” had a friend, or one of the ladies a young man, who was liable, now and then, to make them miss an evening, the Verdurins, who were not in the least afraid of a woman’s having a lover, provided that she had him in their company, loved him in their company and did not prefer him to their company, would say: “Very well, then, bring your friend along.” And he would be engaged on probation, to see whether he was willing to have no secrets from Mme Verdurin, whether he was susceptible of being enrolled in the “little clan.” If he failed to pass, the faithful one who had introduced him would be taken on one side, and would be tactfully assisted to break with the friend or lover or mistress. But if the test proved satisfactory, the newcomer would in turn be numbered among the “faithful.” And so when, that year, the demi-mondaine told M. Verdurin that she had made the acquaintance of such a charming man, M. Swann, and hinted that he would very much like to be allowed to come, M. Verdurin carried the request at once to his wife. (He never formed an opinion on any subject until she had formed hers, it being his special function to carry out her wishes and those of the “faithful” generally, which he did with boundless ingenuity.)
“My dear, Mme de Crécy has something to say to you. She would like to bring one of her friends here, a M. Swann. What do you say?”
“Why, as if anybody could refuse anything to a little angel like that. Be quiet; no one asked your opinion. I tell you you’re an angel.”
“Just as you like,” replied Odette, in an affected tone, and then added: “You know I’m not fishing for compliments.”8
“Very well; bring your friend, if he’s nice.”
Now there was nothing whatsoever in common between the “little nucleus” and the society which Swann frequented, and true socialites would have thought it hardly worth while to occupy so exceptional a position in the fashionable world in order to end up with an introduction to the Verdurins. But Swann was so fond of women that, once he had got to know more or less all the women of the aristocracy and they had nothing more to teach him, he had ceased to regard those naturalisation papers, almost a patent of nobility, which the Faubourg Saint-Germain had bestowed upon him, except as a sort of negotiable bond, a letter of credit with no intrinsic value but which enabled him to improvise a status for himself in some out-of-the-way place in the country, or in some obscure quarter of Paris, where the good-looking daughter of a local squire or town clerk had taken his fancy. For at such times desire, or love, would revive in him a feeling of vanity from which he was now quite free in his everyday life (although it was doubtless this feeling which had originally prompted him towards the career as a man of fashion in which he had squandered his intellectual gifts on frivolous amusements and made use of his erudition in matters of art only to advise society ladies what pictures to buy and how to decorate their houses), which made him eager to shine, in the eyes of any unknown beauty he had fallen for, with an elegance which the name Swann did not in itself imply. And he was most eager when the unknown beauty was in humble circumstances. Just as it is not by other men of intelligence that an intelligent man is afraid of being thought a fool, so it is not by a nobleman but by an oaf that a man of fashion is afraid of finding his social value underrated. Three-quarters of the mental ingenuity and the mendacious boasting squandered ever since the world began by people who are only cheapened thereby, have been aimed at inferiors. And Swann, who